As the regular season winds down, the bragging right for Conference RPI champ is down to the wire. It will be determined by each leagues post season success... it's gone back and forth the past few days with the Evil Empire vs. Upstart UAA taking a .0007 or .0008 lead.... today UAA sits on top.

yes, this is pretty cool. I appreciate you posting. I hope you are right about my team. It would be nice to finally win a championship. Not too happy about Palm Beach being in my bracket so early, assuming I can get by Martin Luther and he advances as well. I can easily see losing to PBA.

I will update the spreadsheet with the winners in bold and see if it is any more accurate than a coin flip. Should be plenty of time for it now that there is no need to spend time on game planning or any of that kind of nonsense.

Fascinating stuff. Looks like it underestimated Webster, though! Congrats to the Gorloks (awesome mascot, btw), and all the other Elite 8 teams. Huge congrats to the University with 4 teams in the E8. Incredible. You guys have had the better of us the last couple years, but don't think the GNE will be going away!

Okay, I will just put it here it is probably easier that way, but I will warn you that I am a little long winded on this kind of stuff.

What I did was load the rosters of each D3 team into a database and then take the top 3, top 6, and top 9 players from each team for each core attribute (I did all this last season). My thinking in doing that was to find attributes that are important to everybody (like athleticism) and those that are important to have a couple of players high in (like perimeter).

Once I did that, I ran a script that would apply a weight to each of those values and come up with a total team rating. It would then rank each team by rating and compare it with the projection report rankings and return a total variance. I had it continue to apply different weights to each group to get the lowest variance per team that I could. It ended up so that about 70% of the teams were within about 40 (e.g., a team I had at 150 was within the range 110-190 on the projection report 70% of the time). Since there was a lot of bunching in the rankings except for the very top end teams I thought this was about at as good as I was going to get it.

I then proceeded to work on determining my own method of calculating the spread between two teams using their rating and the site of the game. I did this by analyzing about 300 games between SIM teams only (I think human controlled teams have a pretty significant effect on the outcome through game planning and I was concerned that it would poison the results so I skipped any game with a human involved). I found that the most accurate prediction I could make was multiplying the rating the difference between the two teams by 2.4 and then giving the home team 1.1 points. I could then determine the percentage that a team would win by applying the percentage that the results of the actual games that I analyzed were within the spread. For example, 50% of the games that I analyzed were within about 7.5 points of my spread, so I would calculate a team that is supposed to win by 7.5 points will win about 75% of the time. That is how I came up with the predictions for the tournament results.

There are a few things that this does not take into account, most notably game-planning. It also does not give credit to coaches who have recruited specifically for the offense and defense that their teams run. In order to be a more accurate picture it would probably need to have separate formulas for each offense-defense combination. It also does not take into account IQ for those teams that may be switching offenses or defenses.

I did learn a few things in regards to what attributes are most important, at least if my analysis can be trusted. I was overvaluing LP in my post players and not giving rebounding enough weight. I am going to recruit posts heavily weighted toward athleticism and rebounding from now on. I also found that I need to value passing more in all positions, but ball handling just in the guards and small forward. I think the conventional wisdom is that ball handling is important for the bigs, too, so we will see how that works out for me. Athleticism is king as everyone knows, but can be sacrificed a little bit in the guard positions in order to get more speed, passing, ball handling/perimeter.

Great stuff. Thanks for sharing. I have often wondered if passing had much value... it seems some coaches are sacrificing it in favor of some other attributes if they have to choose. And at D3, you usually have to settle with some type of weakness, so it comes down to what you value. Personally, I still value passing, but struggle to see how it impacts outcomes. It seems easier to see the impact of rebounding, per, and LP.

I would argue that passing in forwards (PF + Centers) is not that important in the opinion of many very successful coaches. Personally, I figure passing gets more important as you move down from the 5 to the 1 position, respectively.

I used to think game planning didn't matter that much. But I am a believer that is makes a difference now. Of course, having overwhelming talent helps too.